DB2 offers application designers new functionality for their data warehousing requirements. The new DB2 10 Temporal Tables provide a way to have a snapshot in time of the status of customers, orders or any other type of business situation.

DB2 Temporal Tables, with their built in functionality, automatically understand the business time or system time of the data entered into the system. This functionality is ideal for handling and documenting the condition of the any business aspect at a certain time. This functionality is driven from two new column definitions, BUSINESS_TIME and SYSTEM_TIME, defined within a table definition. Using these new time period columns within a DB2 Temporal Table definition provides a system-maintained, a period-maintained or bi-temporal time period for your data.

Many systems today have manual processes or utilities that manage or migrate their real time data to history tables. The new DB2 Temporal Tables with their new system time and business time columns can be used in conjunction with a user-defined trigger to automatically migrate transactional temporal table data to another user defined HISTORY table. Having these facilities built into the database greatly improves regulatory compliance, operations and overall DB2 performance tuning.

Separating out the real time transaction data versus the old data within your database using the HISTORY table requires planning and design steps. The separation of the old data from new data guarantees application and SQL performance does not suffer when your database is fully populated. Separation of the old and new data also helps DB2 performance tuning management so more resources can be delegated to maintaining base new transaction data where DB2 performance tuning matters for business operational success.

Over the coming weeks I will go through the steps and design decisions required to set up a Temporal Table. We will go through the SYSTEM_TIME, BUSINESS_TIME and a bi-temporal table design.

As the 2011 European IDUG approaches, it’s good to remember the annual North American IDUG conference in May where the latest and greatest information about DB2 was unveiled. The IDUG Board of Directors and especially the Conference Planning Committee did a great job providing qualified users, consultants and IBM developers as speakers to discuss their technical experiences with DB2 for z/OS and LUW, including the new release of DB2 10. DB2 performance tuning, application development and DBA topics filled the agenda and everyone learned the latest techniques to help their companies gain the competitive advantage

DB2 10 Beta program was the largest with testing by 24 companies and the most successful testing period ever for a new DB2 version.

The DB2 10 for z/OS software is only about a year old and is definitely being tested by an ever growing number of companies. The very nature of a new release requires the regular introduction of the maintenance for both z/OS and DB2 for the best stable environment and to fully leverage its performance tuning improvements. It is recommended that companies planning to go to DB2 10 should plan on at least quarterly maintenance cycles to fully incorporate all APARs, Hipers, and other fixes or enhancements.

DB2 10 continues to be enhanced due to some of the issues discovered during the beta program and other items that needed additional work. The DB2 for z/OS Version 9 Plan Stability feature is getting a lot of attention with its ability to help with production package access path preservation. The DB2 10 additional features of APCOMPARE and APREUSE are still being worked on. Even if these new enhancements don’t make it in the release, Plan stability continues to be a great feature introduced in DB2 for z/OS Version 9 for guaranteeing that access paths stay the same or improve with every new developer version.

For those of you that are looking for the DB2 10 White Paper the sign up link for the free download of the PDF from the IBM website is below. You have to sign up because they want to know how many people download the DB2 10 White Paper, but it’s free and you can opt out of any email spam. So download it today at: